Sep 17 Q&A with Sammy Clifford of WSTR

With their unapologetically pop-punk EP SKRWD out now, WSTR are certainly making waves in the pop-punk scene. It's hard not to find yourself singing along to the catchy melodies or jamming to the upbeat songs on SKRWD, or at the very least laughing at their ridiculous and fun music videos.

We had the chance to chat with vocalist Sammy Clifford about the band's new EP, their funny videos and pop-punk. Check out the full interview, as well as the music video for "Fair Weather" below, and pick up SKRWD now via No Sleep Records!

Interview by Shannon Shumaker

Can you tell us a little bit about WSTR for anyone who may not be familiar?

We are a five piece pop punk band from Liverpool.

You guys just released your EP, SKRWD on September 4th. Can you tell us a little bit about it? What’s the story behind the EP?

Honestly we just threw these songs together really. We were not expecting anything to happen from it at all!

Are there any themes or messages that you wanted to touch on with these songs?

It’s all very generic to pop punk to be honest. A lot of them are about breaking away from your daily routine that you might hate and that there is better stuff out there.

Which songs were you really excited for listeners to hear?

"Brainsick" is a cool one and "Ain’t Great" also.

I feel SKRWD is very unapologetically pop-punk. What do you feel makes a good pop-punk record?

Fast and loud with relatable lyrics and sing-alongs.

You’ve talked before about the decision you made to start a band that you were proud of, so when do you think you first realized that music was something that you wanted to pursue?

I’ve always been heavily into music but I fully realized when I was about 15/16 so I hung up the football boots and started to work on my band.

What would you like listeners to be able to take away from your music?

I want my melodies to spin round peoples heads. Always a big one for me as I work hard on making them as catchy as I can. If people relate to my lyrics too then that’s incredible.

Your music videos are also so entertaining and fun to watch! What has been your favorite video or scene to shoot?

Thank you! The ‘Fair Weather’ video was probably the most fun to shoot out of the two overall. We had a shot-by-shot plan for the day so it felt a lot more relaxed and organised than filming for ‘Graveyard’ where we pretty much decided what we were doing in each scene on the spot. The most fun scene that we have filmed though for me was either Sammy getting pushed into the pool, just because it was middle of winter and funny to see him dunked in a freezing pool, or when we were running around in a shopping cart in a grocery store parking lot with smoke bombs strapped to it. We set off a few fireworks as a test because we were going to use them as well as the smoke bombs but decided it’d be a bit too dangerous. How we didn’t have the cops called on us I’ll never know!

Do you have any plans for some more fun videos in the future?

Right now we don’t have any more plans for videos at all as we don’t have any more material to release! But definitely in future we’d like to keep that humorous feel to our videos. We don’t wanna take them too seriously as our songs are quite fast paced and energetic, so we want an entertaining video to reflect that.

Now that the EP is out, do you have any other big plans for this year?

Touring and writing. We just got off our first headline tour of the UK which went down really well, and we’ve got a couple things lined up for the rest of the year but nothing too intense. We’ve done quite a lot of one-off’s here and there leading up to the EP release so I think the main focus for now is writing for the next record.

Thanks for taking the time to chat with us! Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Thanks for having us! And you can download our EP ‘Skrwd’ which is out now on iTunes or buy it on vinyl/CD from No Sleep Records